Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast

Copy Paste from the mail!!!! An interesting management article from Dr.YLR Moorthi.


Have Breakfast… or…Be Breakfast!


Who sells the largest number of cameras in India?


Your guess is likely to be Sony, Canon or Nikon. Answer is none of the
above. The winner is Nokia whose main line of business in India is not
cameras but cell phones.


Reason being cameras bundled with cellphones are outselling stand alone
cameras. Now, what prevents the cellphone from replacing the camera
outright? Nothing at all. One can only hope the Sony’s and Canons are
taking note.


Try this. Who is the biggest in music business in India? You think it is
HMV Sa-Re-Ga-Ma? Sorry. The answer is Airtel. By selling caller tunes (that
play for 30 seconds) Airtel makes more than what music companies make by
selling music albums (that run for hours).


Incidentally Airtel is not in music business. It is the mobile service
provider with the largest subscriber base in India. That sort of competitor
is difficult to detect, even more difficult to beat (by the time you have
identified him he has already gone past you). But if you imagine that Nokia
and Bharti (Airtel's parent) are breathing easy you can't be farther from
truth.


Nokia confessed that they all but missed the Smartphone bus. They admit
that Apple's I phone and Google's Android can make life difficult in
future. But you never thought Google was a mobile company, did you? If
these illustrations mean anything, there is a bigger game unfolding. It is
not so much about mobile or music or camera or emails?


The "Mahabharata" (the great Indian epic battle) is about "what is
tomorrow's personal digital device"? Will it be a souped up mobile or a
palmtop with a telephone? All these are little wars that add up to that big
battle. Hiding behind all these wars is a gem of a question – "who is my
competitor?"


Once in a while, to intrigue my students I toss a question at them. It says
"What Apple did to Sony, Sony did to Kodak, explain?" The smart ones get
the answer almost immediately. Sony defined its market as audio (music from
the walkman). They never expected an IT company like Apple to encroach into
their audio domain. Come to think of it, is it really surprising? Apple as
a computer maker has both audio and video capabilities. So what made Sony
think he won't compete on pure audio? "Elementary Watson". So also Kodak
defined its business as film cameras, Sony defines its businesses as
"digital."


In digital camera the two markets perfectly meshed. Kodak was torn between
going digital and sacrificing money on camera film or staying with films
and getting left behind in digital technology. Left undecided it lost in
both. It had to. It did not ask the question "who is my competitor for
tomorrow?" The same was true for IBM whose mainframe revenue prevented it
from seeing the PC. The same was true of Bill Gates who declared "internet
is a fad!" and then turned around to bundle the browser with windows to
bury Netscape. The point is not who is today's competitor. Today's
competitor is obvious. Tomorrow's is not.


In 2008, who was the toughest competitor to British Airways in India?
Singapore airlines? Better still, Indian airlines? Maybe, but there are
better answers. There are competitors that can hurt all these airlines and
others not mentioned. The answer is videoconferencing and telepresence
services of HP and Cisco. Travel dropped due to recession. Senior IT
executives in India and abroad were compelled by their head quarters to use
videoconferencing to shrink travel budget. So much so, that the mad
scramble for American visas from Indian techies was nowhere in sight in
2008. (India has a quota of something like 65,000 visas to the U.S. They
were going a-begging. Blame it on recession!). So far so good. But to think
that the airlines will be back in business post recession is something I
would not bet on. In short term yes. In long term a resounding no.
Remember, if there is one place where Newton's law of gravity is applicable
besides physics it is in electronic hardware. Between 1977 and 1991 the
prices of the now dead VCR (parent of Blue-Ray disc player) crashed to
one-third of its original level in India. PC's price dropped from hundreds
of thousands of rupees to tens of thousands. If this trend repeats then
telepresence prices will also crash. Imagine the fate of airlines then. As
it is not many are making money. Then it will surely be RIP!


India has two passions. Films and cricket. The two markets were distinctly
different. So were the icons. The cricket gods were Sachin and Sehwag. The
filmi gods were the Khans (Aamir Khan, Shah Rukh Khan and the other Khans
who followed suit). That was, when cricket was fundamentally test cricket
or at best 50 over cricket. Then came IPL and the two markets collapsed
into one. IPL brought cricket down to 20 overs. Suddenly an IPL match was
reduced to the length of a 3 hour movie. Cricket became film's competitor.
On the eve of IPL matches movie halls ran empty. Desperate multiplex owners
requisitioned the rights for screening IPL matches at movie halls to hang
on to the audience. If IPL were to become the mainstay of cricket, as it is
likely to be, films have to sequence their releases so as not clash with
IPL matches. As far as the audience is concerned both are what in India are
called 3 hour "tamasha" (entertainment). Cricket season might push films
out of the market.


Look at the products that vanished from India in the last 20 years. When
did you last see a black and white movie? When did you last use a fountain
pen? When did you last type on a typewriter? The answer for all the above
is "I don't remember!" For some time there was a mild substitute for the
typewriter called electronic typewriter that had limited memory. Then came
the computer and mowed them all. Today most technologically challenged guys
like me use the computer as an upgraded typewriter. Typewriters per se are
nowhere to be seen.


One last illustration. 20 years back what were Indians using to wake them
up in the morning? The answer is "alarm clock." The alarm clock was a
monster made of mechanical springs. It had to be physically keyed every day
to keep it running. It made so much noise by way of alarm, that it woke you
up and the rest of the colony. Then came quartz clocks which were sleeker.
They were much more gentle though still quaintly called "alarms." What do
we use today for waking up in the morning? Cellphone! An entire industry of
clocks disappeared without warning thanks to cell phones. Big watch
companies like Titan were the losers. You never know in which bush your
competitor is hiding!


On a lighter vein, who are the competitors for authors? Joke spewing
machines? (Steve Wozniak, the co-founder of Apple, himself a Pole, tagged a
Polish joke telling machine to a telephone much to the mirth of Silicon
Valley). Or will the competition be story telling robots? Future is scary!
The boss of an IT company once said something interesting about the animal
called competition. He said "Have breakfast …or…. be breakfast"! That sums
it up rather neatly.


—Dr. Y. L. R. Moorthi is a professor at the Indian Institute of Management
Bangalore. He is an M.Tech from Indian Institute of Technology, Madras and
a post graduate in management from IIM, Bangalore.

Can we cater to their needs...

It  was an evening of celebration inside Infosys Campus, as SI (Systems Integration unit) had touched 5000 employees mark. This indeed was a memorable day in the history of SI unit. But there was something which made the event even more special. It was a performance by Apann Vidyalaya students (It is an institute in Pimpri Chinchwad area of Pune for differently abled underprivileged kids).

What goes below is a Social Media Marketing pitch for those who may not be able to reach out to Internet to make a pitch for them.

1.       First of all I am proud that my unit took this opportunity to give stage to these students. As such the Infosys has many well known social service campaigns running all over India. One of them being Sparsh Foundation, Pune.

2.       The students put up a group performance on song “sone ki chidiyaan”. At one hand while this feat was spell bounding, on the other it gave us a heartrending experience. There were kids who could barely manage to stand but were taking the lead on the stage dancing to the tunes of the legendary song, kids who could barely see but were dressed as “Sone ki chidiyaan” and were doing rounds of the stage, and a lot more. What immediately followed after that performance was a standing ovation by Infoscions (which continued till the last kid was on stage.)

3.       This was followed by a small speech by trustee who thanked the society for their patronage and giving a chance to the students to showcase their talent.

4.       And this was followed by an array of questions that came to my mind right at that moment… I recount few of them here:

a.       Does a long standing ovation suffice? Can it give these students what they have dreamt of?

b.      If not standing ovations, will monetary help suffice? Can just money get them what they always wanted?

c.       Oh well, first of all do we know what is it that they want?

d.      So does that mean we spend time with them to figure out what they want?

e.      Ok, given you have got time to share with them… will it solve their problems or for that matter problems of the trustee managing the institute?

And the toughest realization rather the question that followed was…

Are we just a result of our birth? Had I been born in a slum, I would had been underprivileged. But since I was born in a well to do middle class Indian family, I became an engineer. So does that mean it’s a mere bad luck that these kids are not only underprivileged but also differently abled?

A ten minute of deep thinking on this topic can get you a severe headache and make you stand before a mirror and ask yourself who you are… But the point is… even this won’t help the cause of these kids!!!

As of now, I see just one solution… It can be through talking to them, listening to them, helping them support each other, energizing the ones with extraordinary determination and making him an example for others and finally… Embracing them as an integral part of our society rather our family and responsibility!!!

Any second thoughts???

After a long time....

“Time will pass on; summers will come and go,
My assets may wither; the relations may get on low,
But nothing can tear me away from my ambitions,
And that is something I surely know”

I return back to the world of blogging with this note. (Check out the time of my last post. I will give you an idea that how long I have been offline. And the subject would tell you why I was Offline :-)) To the few readers, which I have... I am sorry for such a long break. But then life at times gets you on back foot and you are not left with any other options but to postpone all your plans and do what destiny dictates. All said and done... the fact remains that any emotional or professional setback can cut only as deep as you let it cut. Unfortunately for me, I gave my setback more time than it ever deserved. Notwithstanding, I have finally decided to return to my blog.

Getting back to business , I would like to remind you that the blog is about Entrepreneurship, start ups and GMAT. In the meanwhile I’ll also chip in with some book reviews and movie reviews (new). Off course the trivia , which has turned out to be more of centi”Mental” drama will continue to feature in my blogs. I simply can’t help it.

What’s new??? This time around, I have definitely matured in terms of start ups. So my new posts would ne now based more on ground work than Internet research. As here onwards I’ll be bringing to table the data from real markets; Retail, IT and other sectors. Now one thing that’s obvious as of now is the data would be too close to Indian market (I am yet to become a global citizen).

Now, a word on current impositions on bloggers put by Supreme Court in India. For those who don’t know about it, certain rules and restrictions have been imposed on bloggers from India in wake of some audacious posts put in by some bloggers (Even I am not very sure about it). As far as I feel my blog is far away from politics and public matter. However, you never know what may offend who... so to be on the safer side, I’ll request all my readers to intimate me immediately in case they see anything offensive on the blog. The post will either be edited or taken off altogether. You see just like everyone else, even I don’t want to attract unnecessary attention and issues.

Happy reading.....